Week 12 assignment

strategically presenting your information is extremely important. Videos, pictures and songs are great ways to get into your audiences head and leave an impression. I choose a picture of the people who feed the hungry and those who use the food drives resources. This allows the audience to see the tradeoff between the people who serve and the people who receive. As you may notice two of the people who are serving are wearing navy shirts. This shows people that people of all different prestiges and backgrounds come to help the people in need.

Second, I found a great youtube video of food banks providing people with hot food and beverages. it is imperative for our audience to see where their money is going to. To see how much it helps the everyday person who can not eat. Many people can afford to donate a little extra a month, that honestly goes such a long way.

Lastly, I found a very inspirational song. I believe the song will make the people inspired to donate. I really hope the song hits home for a lot of people and makes them want to donate some of the extra things they have.

 

Week 11 Story Boards

Our groups process was a long and tough one. We had to decide which was we wanted to attack our dilemma and really push forward. When assigning group members roles for the story board we found it hard to make 10 slides worth of information. This was partly due to writing too much on one page. Once one of us made a slide we got carried away and started writing about the other group members approach to our topic. We were able to overcome that by limiting what we put on the slide, but still answering the question and proposition we had. If there is one more element our group should put in, it is probably a graph of families that need our assistances and how much is available to them. This would really allow people to get a clear representation of why our goal is so important to helping these people get their nourishment. Creating a story board is a great way to put an influx amount of ideas into a clear representation, that is easy for our group to read and adjust. Our ultimate vision for this project is to give our audience a clean-cut picture of what needs to be done to help these people, and how we are going to strategically approach it. We want to use as many multi-media tools that were presented to us in class, to show people in many different formats how we plan to reach our goals. We are currently leaning more towards videos, memes and hopefully graphs as i mentioned before. We believe those formats are the best way to communicate to our audience, and hopefully not bore them to death with boring power point presentations.

Week 10 assignment

The strategical narratives my group has created are really important to how we tie everything together. We believe that in able to see the struggles of these people in everyday life we need to really take a walk in their shoes and the people who serve them. Our three ideas consist of following families that use the charitable resources day to day, go to public schools and showing how their donations really make a difference and lastly trailing the workers at the food banks. All these ideas will be displayed in video format with the consent of the workers, families and schools. We want to dig deep into the lives of the people who use these resources, see what the people who serve them think about them, and to show the children of more fortunate families, the importance of giving back to the less fortunate. Showing a video of these people going to food drives, will give the audience a taste of how desperate you have to be to bring you and your family to one when you have no other options left. Getting video footage of the men and women that devote their time to feed these people should also help to inspire many people to give more of what they have, may it be time or extra food, every little bit helps tremendously! I honestly can not see any cons to these 3 ideas beside not being able to show the video, prezi and memes to our target audience. If the people really saw with their own eyes what their donations are doing to help these people, i believe we could increase the amount of donations given tremendously!

Week 9 assignment

First, I would like to say our group did a great job on our first meeting, working out the kinks and really getting a grip of what we need to do to tackle such an important aspect that is plaguing our great state today! We decided that we are going to try and promote organizations, like companies, schools and the everyday person alike to try and increase their donations so charitable food drives have more food to offer to the hungry. We realized that there are many necessities in the human life such as food shelter and water. Most people can only afford the shelter and water part of the three main needs. We want people to be able to live in a habitable arrangement and not have to worry about when they are going to eat next. Many lower income families can not afford to feed themselves and their children every night, that being said my group feels that those people need to have sources to provide them with food when needed. I believe our 5 links we have found so far will help us find an audience willing to support this cause. Our three strategical way of communicating our information are as follows. A well designed Prezi to creatively entice our target audience, using informative and creative memes and lastly make an informercial highlighting the decline in public donations, and the rise of the need of these donations. It is stated by Feeding America that there is a 62% increase in need for food in New Jersey, but they also saw a decline in the amount of donations given to these charities! We are going to do the best we can to change that, and by the look of it, we are definitely heading in the right direction in persuading companies, schools and people to give what they can to help a good cause!

 

Video Editing

Creating my very own video was a great experience. But as with the other projects we had to do it was frustrating in the beginning. I didn’t use the traditional Imovie instead I used a editing tool called Proshow. It was awesome, it had so many different tools to use and really made the editing a fun time. Being that is it a very in depth system it took a lot of tries to master it. With so many different things to do I was flustered trying to find what I would like to do to my video. I am an avid Youtube watcher and been so since the the start of its rise. I have always wanted to make my own video but never got around to it. With having done this assigment I finally made my own Youtube account and plan on posting videos to it. I have so many pictures and videos of me and my friends playing sports and doing things that we enjoy doing. It would be great to finally get those out in the open and let people see what my friends and I do. The only thing that concerns me is being able to upload it onto Youtube from the Proshow device. I had trouble posting my video to my Youtube account, I finally figured out how to do it, but to be honest I totally forgot how I ended up doing it. Other than that I am happy with my work and hope to do more in the future.

Memes

Memes are becoming a huge part of the social world. They can be used in campaigns, sports and just to prove a point or make someone laugh. The memes I choose in my opinion are funny. Being the person I am, funny memes really stick out to me more than factual ones. The first meme I choose was with Ron Burgandy and the caption reads, “You lost your phone and it’s on silent, Too bad, if you liked it, you should have put a ring on it. This meme cleverly shows how addicted people are to their phones using Beyonce’s catchy song. I think it is crazy how addicted people are to their phones and losing it when it is on silent is devastating and a true panic. My second meme was with a baby who doesn’t want to go back to school. Right now this is how I feel even though break has just started, but I know it will fly by! My last meme talks about Facebook, and how maybe people should start putting their “face in a book” rather than using the social media sensation. To create a successful meme you need to captivate your audience. Talking about things that are important to yourself and others, or something that is trending is a good start. Using Ang’s paradigms, The uses and gratification paradigm is great for this. People want to see things that make them gratified and happy they read it. Audiences are very active in what they view and you want to make your meme funny for a broad group of people. When you make a meme you also want to elicit a response from your audience. For example, political memes are made to make people choose their campaign or bash their oppositions. Memes can help you express yourself and your views by making a meme that is significant to you. Maybe talk about your political views or even how you feel about an upcoming sports event. I think memes can be viewed as a top-down process and a way to reinstate old advertising cycles. They can influence control if thats how the producer wants it. Using memes are a great way to “sell” your point or ideas. The use of a meme in my groups final project is important as it is another way to get someone to understand your point of view. As we talk about ways to help the homeless it will really help Buffy to see where I’m coming from and possibly have it stick in her head because its such a new way of advertising ideas.

Memes

Memes

Audio Editing (Podcast)

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Audio editing or podcasts are a key way to strategically present information that is factual or opinionated. Whether you are a sports writer or a fashion enthusiast podcasts are a great way to express your feelings and display news about what is going on in what your interested in. My podcast talks about some of the good and hard parts about making a podcast and some of the dilemmas I went through. For my first podcast i think it went pretty well.

First, creating your first podcast could be somewhat challenging and quite annoying. You see some of your favorite writers make such good podcasts and you think “this cant be that hard”, but it is truly an art. Discovering how to splice and crossfade took me a considerable amount of time, but once I figured it out, I realized how important it was to making a successful podcast! I enjoyed choosing my favorite songs for the introduction and during the time that I was speaking

Overall, I think my first podcast was actually pretty good. I learned that talking for a minute actually is a lot longer when you are being recorded. I really want to challenge myself and learn some more of the techniques to make your podcasts even more interesting and fun for your audience to view. I could possibly add more songs and funny voiceovers to make people laugh and keep things unique. But as I said before for my first time, I think i did some good work, and there is much more to come.

For my future in using garageband a other podcast devices, I think doing projects like these will truly help. I plan on being a psychologist and can use podcasts to show my techniques on analyzing people in therapy. It is important to facilitate new ideas in any aspect of knowledge, especially psychology in that it is always changing.

Authenticity and DIY publishing

Audio, video and print are essential in todays world. Most of the audio, video and print are mainly produced by the mainstream media, so that is normally what we encounter throughout our lives. Though this is true there is great quality work done by DIY publishing or formally “Do It Yourself publishing”. These “underground publishing acts are a great form of expression but they feel that media “own the land” and they “work the land”(Azzerad 72). It is very hard for these people to get their work out and when they do they cant even take full credit for it . That is why American singer songwriter Dale Boon wanted to DIY publish to keep the credit for himself and the band. It is very important to keep authenticity when you DIY publish or you may get fined heavily for infringement. Just like the discussion we had in class about authenticity and choosing photos that could be copied without infringing the copyright status. We were told to change our google search to narrow down images that were not bound to any publication. Copyrights are a very important aspect to the world of creativity, a good point made by the professor was “no copyright is like if you plow my driveway and I don’t pay you, but i put signs up about your business”. So using someone else’s work is no good unless you pay for the authorized consent to use their work.

Overall, the use of DIY publishing could be very essential to underground artists, writers and other creative activists, as long as their work is authenticated. Work that is not is otherwise as good as nothing because it does not show true ownership and creativeness from the creator. It is much like academic integrity, if you cheat and get a good grade it is not like you earned the grade you receive and such you should be penalize if caught.